The Ocoee Project runs October 15-20, 2024 at Eastern Connecticut State University
It’s a stage production involving live stage performances, short filmed scenes, and a gospel choir that I wrote with the assistance of fellow Eastern professors Director Brian Day and Set/Lighting Designer Kristen Morgan that tells the story of what happened on November 2, 1920, in Ocoee, FL, when Black men and women went to the polls on the first day that women could vote. It also examines other incidents in which white supremacists have suppressed or even eliminated the votes of people of color through acts of race-based domestic terrorism in places such as Eufaula, AL, Wilmington, NC, and Colfax, LA, as it considers what our country would have been like if these atrocities didn’t happen.